Robert Henri (1865-1929)
Gitana Vieja (Madre Gitana), 1912
 Born Robert Henry Cozad, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the artist took the surname, Henri (pronounced Hen-rye), when he was eighteen because his family was forced to change their identities after his father killed a man in self defense. The name reflected his French heritage, although Henri insisted on an American pronunciation.
After a rather tumultuous childhood, Henri studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia under Thomas Anshutz (1852-1912) where he was instructed in the realist tradition. He later traveled to Europe where he came briefly under the influence of the impressionists, although his palette retained the dark, earth tones of the Philadelphia school.
While in Philadelphia, Henri became a mentor to several younger artists who gathered at his Walnut Street studio to hear his philosophy of art and share criticisms. Four of these painters, together with Henri, were later to form the core of The Eight, a radical group of artists who defended artistic freedom against the strictures of the National Academy in New York after the turn-of-the-century. John Sloan (1871-1951), George Luks (1867-1933), Everett Shinn (1876-1953), and William Glackens (1870-1938) were to remain life-long friends even after they went their separate ways as they each earned their own reputations.
During the summer of 1912, Henri was in Spain with his second wife Marjorie and a group of students. The artist relished painting ordinary people who struck him as full of life and character, about whom he took a broad humanistic vantage:
“The people I like to paint are ‘my people,’ whoever they may be, wherever they may exist, the people through whom dignity of life is manifest, that is, who are in some way expressing themselves naturally along the lines Nature intended for them. My people may be old or young, rich or poor, I may speak their language or I may communicate with them only by gestures. But wherever I find them, the Indian at work in the white man’s way, the Spanish gypsy moving back to the freedom of the hills, the little boy, quiet and reticent before the stranger, my interest is awakened and my impulse is to tell about them through my own language: drawing and painting in color.”
Gitana Vieja (Madre Gitana) of 1912 illustrates Henri’s words, and the artist was evidently struck by his subject’s red skirt and contrasting dark top.
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